Episode 106: Transcript

Being a conversation with the journalist Jonathan M. Katz, about Nazis, free speech, journalism, and knitting

Mike Freedman

Welcome to 1984 Today, your one stop shop for all things dystopian. I'm your host, Mike Freedman. Our guest today is the author and journalist Jonathan Meyerson Katz, a contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, all the news. He's a real newsman. He reported for Associated Press on the Pentagon, the Middle East, the Dominican Republic and the Haitian earthquake of 2010.

The last topic included covering the UN's role in causing a cholera outbreak after the earthquake, which culminated in the U.N. admitting responsibility because of his work. He's won the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism and a National Headliners Award. His most recent book is called Gangsters of Capitalism, tracing the life of General Smedley Butler, of “War is a racket” fame.

And he also writes The Racket, which you can find at theracket.news. On November 28th, 2023, The Atlantic published an article in its Ideas section by Jonathan called Substack Has a Nazi Problem. In it, he describes and takes issue with the ways in which extremist and racist content is published on Substack, often for paying subscribers. Around that time, I'd already invited Elle Griffin to come on the podcast as a guest to discuss her work writing utopian fiction and nonfiction.

It just so happened that Elle also wrote an open letter in defense of Substack's walled garden approach to content moderation in opposition to what was perceived as the more censorious angle in Jonathan's article. Jonathan was kind enough to listen to the episode and he reached out. So we're here together to discuss his perspective on the issue and hopefully a little more besides.

Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me.

Jonathan M. Katz

Hey, thanks for having me.

Mike Freedman

So I suppose what I would like to kick off with is I'd love to know how your article in the Atlantic came about. Was it something you pitched, something you were researching yourself, or was it a commission from them? How did it spring forth?

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, it was a pitch. The way the sort of the back story, it really came out of reporting that I had done over the summer of 2023, on The Racket. The co-founder of Substack, Hamish Mackenzie, had on what was at that moment the Substack flagship podcast. I think the podcast has kind of gone dormant since then, called The Active Voice.

He had as a guest a guy named Richard Hanania who some of your listeners may be familiar with. He was billed as an enlightened centrist or somebody who was promoting enlightened centrism. But I happen to know a little bit about Richard Hanania, really, from social media, from seeing him on Twitter. He describes himself, I think, somewhat facetiously, somewhat self defensively, as a troll.

But he is not a centrist. I also don't think he's particularly enlightened and he says extremely racist things. He holds extremely racist views about the inherent criminality of black people, the inherent differences in intelligence between races, things that are just sort of, you know, definitionally old school, like, you know, early mid 20th century racism.

Mike Freedman

Ideas that might be described as vintage.

Jonathan M. Katz

Vintage. Yes, I would say that. And I was a little put off by the fact that Hamish had him on the podcast and the way that it, because it was a very kid's glove kind of interview. I'm not you know, it's well, I can get into into sort of the nitty gritty of my thoughts about that, but suffice it to say, I just thought that, you know, look, it would make a good newsletter to talk about what does this guy actually believe, you know, and what did he actually talk about during that podcast? And his main thrust was promoting his main intellectual project of late, which has been to call for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the gutting of the Civil Rights Act, I think he would probably say, and at the end of that interview, Hanania, you know, Hamish asked Hanania to recommend some other Substacks that he thought that, you know, listeners might be interested in. And he recommended two white nationalists, one of whom is a self-described, you know, Danish, German ethno nationalist. And the other one is sort of, opinions vary, but he, I think is very, very clearly somebody who promotes a white supremacist worldview. So I wrote about that. He got some attention that ended up creating some sort of follow on reporting that I did about this sort of shady nonprofit that Hanania runs. While I was doing that, that reporting that I did prompted an exposé in The Huffington Post which revealed that not only was Hanania a racist on his Twitter feed today, but ten years before he had written even more extreme, even more explicitly racist and explicitly genocidal writings under a pen name.

And when I say genocidal, his specific form of genocide, this is genocide under the convention, under the UN Convention on genocide. He was calling for the forced sterilization of people who he considers low IQ, which to him includes black and Latino people. So I was like, okay, that's even worse than I thought. And the thing that that, you know, I was like, what will Substack do with this, what will they do with this information?

And they were already, you know, not responding to many requests for comment that I had made. And I should say as a back story, I had been on Substack for, you know, four and a half years, almost five years. At that point, I joined at the personal invitation of Hamish Mackenzie. We were never friends, but like we were, we would, you know, just because we didn't meet each other, we lived in different places, but we, you know, we would correspond cordially on a fairly regular basis, sometimes over the phone. I have his phone number and he was just, you know, ghosting me. He was just, he wasn't responding to comment. And I was like, well, maybe he'll comment on this. Maybe this, like, this definitely seems to be even more fuel to the fire in the case that, you know, he had erred in presenting him as an enlightened centrist, that, you know, to use that quote.

But instead, Substack doubled down. Hanania wrote this sort of non-apology on his Substack in which he, you know, kind of this sort of an apology. He said, yeah, it was like an apology shaped piece. It was the sort of thing that you would look at and be like, Oh, this looks, this is timed like an apology. This is formatted like an apology. But if you actually looked at what he said, he wasn't apologizing for anything. He was saying, you know, I was wrong for calling for forced sterilization. I don't think he used the specific terms, but you can sort of read between the lines and, you know, I'm embarrassed that I was you know, he was writing for extreme, you know, neo-Nazi, including literally alternativeright.com. He wrote for that at the invitation of Richard Spencer and he certainly wants to distance himself from that. He also had a book coming out at the time, but in that non-apology he said that he was the victim of a cancelation effort by liberal journalists who objected to discussing I forget the exact words that he used, but it was essentially like the inherent statistical differences, I think, between races.

So like essentially they don't like the fact that I think that races are different, biologically different from one another. They don't like the fact that I'm racist and Substack just doubled down again. They praised this non-apology and then they continued promoting his work, including his then upcoming book, which came out with HarperCollins. And it was around that time that other people who were, you know, readers of The Racket started sending me, they were like, hey, I don't know if you know this, but there are like actual literal Nazi publications on Substack. And when I say actual literal, I'm talking about like, Heil Hitler, here's a swastika or a black sun, you know, Jews are parasites. It's just, it's like very, you know, very Nazi.

Mike Freedman

Swastikas, side partings, and knee length boots.

Jonathan M. Katz

Right. This is not you know, these were not edge cases. They were like, you should know that these things are out there. And I was trying to figure out, like, well, what do I do with this? So first I, you know, started doing more research. I started looking for and a lot of the research that I was doing was just using Substack's own recommendations feature to see what other, you know, people, people like recommending things that are similar to their points of view.

I did the same thing and I was like, Well, so who were the Nazis recommending? They're recommending other Nazis. And they're also recommending, you know, eugenics blogs, just sort of general white supremacist, anti-Semitic stuff.

Mike Freedman

People who read Adolf Hitler also read Herbert Spencer.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I was like, what? Okay, what do I do with this? So I had a couple of thoughts. My first thought was, well, I'll make a post out of this. Like, I'll, I will, I will put this on, on my Substack and this was, we're talking sort of late summer. It was like September, I think, of 2023.

And at that point I reached out again. I had sort of just become, you know, I don't know about omnipresent, but, you know, I have this sort of like periodically every time something came up when there was this having the post expose, etc., you know, I would write Hamish, I'd write Chris Bassett, who's the Substack CEO, and I'd be like, So, what's your response to this?

So in September, I was like, Look, guys, I have found some really, really, really aggressive stuff, really, this is stuff that and we'll get into sort of my feelings about and what I was going for, but like in the most extreme cases here, like it was, it just seemed very clear to me, like it seems like this is, you have in your terms of service, you don't allow hate.

And it seems like a newsletter that calls itself like a National Socialist newsletter and has as its entrance graphic the Brandenburg Gate during like Hitler's birthday celebration in like 1936 or something like that with like swastika banners hung from it, it seems to me it seems like that might violate your terms of service. I think.

Mike Freedman

It might be hate adjacent.

Jonathan M. Katz

It might be hate adjacent. And I'm like, I'm trying to, maybe I sound facetious, but I'm like, I can't speak for you guys. I need you to speak for yourselves. Like, what is going on here? What, what? What's happening here? And they didn't respond. And I was and then I was like, okay, so I'm a journalist, right?

And I'm like, all right. So I've got information here. I think it's interesting. I think people should know about it. Also, the only people who can really answer this question about like what their policy is and like what, what their vision for Substack is, what they're doing, are the Substack founders who despite the fact that we used to, you know, trade emails frequently and the fact that I've like bought into their, you know, crowdfunding project when their series C fundraising round failed, have decided, you know, new phone who dis.

I was like, well, okay, so one way to do this is to put this in a national publication. And, you know, for anyone who is listening, who doesn't know how this works, some people who are on like sort of contracts or who work for a place and they sort of have a regular piece, they might need the editor to buy in on their idea, but like they can get things in more easily. I'm a freelance journalist. I don't work for The Atlantic, I don't work for The New Yorker. I don't work for any of the other places that I've written for. I have done work for them, but I'm not on staff. I don't work for them. So I pitched a couple of different places and The Atlantic bit, they were like, okay, this sounds interesting. What do you got? And we talked about it and I, you know, put together a draft and it went through various iterations. And then ultimately took a lot of editing, world events intervened, both on my end and theirs in terms of, of things that were also drawing our interest.

And the piece ended up coming out, as you said, in late November. So after several months of work and, you know, it was only having this piece published in The Atlantic that got Substack to come out of their shell at all and make any kind of comment. And it was a fairly anodyne comment, but that was it. And I put the piece out and we can talk about what's happened since.

Mike Freedman

Well, I suppose then maybe before we get into what the result of the publishing of the article was in terms of pushback and responses that you received, something that I think might be useful, I know I'd like to know and I think it would be useful at this point as well, is for you yourself: You're a journalist. Your job is writing things, often as your track record shows, that some people don't want to hear and would probably prefer weren't published.

So what kind of end game did you have in mind if you had one in mind at all for publishing the article? So for instance, what I mean by that is one of the interpretations of the article, and I say interpretations because you're here, it's for you to say, but one of the interpretations is that it was essentially either pushing for or calling for or kind of implicitly suggesting that it would be better if certain types of content were banned centrally, were prevented from being published or were demonetized, deamplified and so forth.

I'm not saying you meant to say that, but reading the article and from what people who I have spoken to about it said, that was definitely an implication they picked up from it. So from you, what was, what did you have in mind when you were writing it? What were you trying to get Substack to say when you ended up publishing the article? Because they didn't say anything to you before.

Jonathan M. Katz

My goal somewhat narrowly construed, and I think, you know, it's a thing that often informs my journalism in general, is that I didn't have like, I wasn't making a policy prescription. I very rarely do, you know, you were talking, you know, sort of in the intro about my reporting on the cholera epidemic in Haiti after the earthquake. That was an epidemic that ended up killing, you know, 10,000 people, maybe several multiples of that. The sort of estimates vary. And at the time, I was getting, you know, sort of similar questions from people at the U.N., people at the CDC, at the W.H.O., people even in my own news organization at the Associated Press, who I did work for at the time as a full time employee, like, what are you trying to do?

I was like, I'm trying to figure out who, what caused the cholera epidemic and why there seems to be a cover up, why there are contradictions and so on. Out of that reporting, a movement sprung up that I wasn't part of, except as somebody who was sort of informing it as as a journalist to get reparations for the cholera victims in Haiti, for people who were sickened and the families of people who died. But I wasn't like, you know, my first piece wasn't, you know, U.N. caused cholera in Haiti, reparations needed. Right? It was just there seems to be something happening at this U.N. base. The U.N. says that there's nothing happening here. But I went to the base and it seems like there is, there's evidence here that there was some kind of sewage leak and that a cholera epidemic seems to have come from here.

And it's sort of similar here. Like all I had was a surprising and somewhat shocking to me number of white supremacist, white nationalist, absolute like, literal neo-Nazi, some neo-Confederate, those guys exist still in the world, like newsletters out there on Substack. And I thought people should know about it and I wanted to know what Substack policy was about it so that...I'm a Substacker, right? So I could make a decision about what to do with my newsletter so other people could make decisions about what to do with theirs. If you read the piece, which some people who criticized it, have.

Mike Freedman

Other people just saw the headline and then got mad?

Jonathan M. Katz

Yes, exactly. I'm sure. Yeah. And there's a paywall. I get it. I mean, there's you know, and everybody's busy, but like, if you read the piece, I think it comes through or at least I tried to make it come through that I'm somewhat ambivalent about the question of de-platforming and kicking people offline in general. I quote, it was...

Mike Freedman

Whitney Phillips.

Jonathan M. Katz

Whitney Phillips, yeah. She's a professor at the University of Oregon. She's done a lot of work on online extremism. She wrote a very helpful document called The Oxygen of Amplification. And, you know, I quote her in the piece being like, you know, banning people from social media platforms, which Substack is one, often backfires. It makes them feel like victims.

It inspires sometimes new people to rush to their cause. It can be a fundraising opportunity. On the other hand, there is evidence out there that to a certain extent for certain kinds of speech and certain kinds of situations, de-platforming works. It keeps hateful ideologies from gaining steam. And it's, these are not simple questions.

And because of that, I wasn't proposing a simple answer. In fact, you know, I can tell you that, you know, in my conversations with my editors at The Atlantic, you know, they were you know, I was like I was like, look, I'm not writing a piece that's like the following newsletters should be banned from Substack. And they were like, Look, but you have to take a position on this because people are going to read it as if you are saying it.

Mike Freedman

So it was the editorial discussion around how to position the article and tone it that in part they encouraged you to, not slant, but to have a position rather than to say this is happening and people should know and feel the way they feel about it.

Jonathan M. Katz

I mean, look, I stand by the piece entirely. I'm not trying to throw my editors under the bus. I'm not sure.

Mike Freedman

But it's curious. It's interesting for me, too.

Jonathan M. Katz

I mean, yeah, I mean, like so I can tell you as I remember it, like there's a line in there, this, I think the end of, you know, section that's like, you know, if, you know, if a National Socialist newsletter doesn't violate, you know, Substack policy against hate speech, like, what does? That I think was a line that was suggested to me by the editor.

Now, the fact that it's in there is in large part because I was like, yeah, that's a good point. And then like a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, people who, there are people who don't agree or who don't agree with sort of the entire conversation or don't want to have had this conversation. And they'll just sort of say kind of like almost offhandedly, I'm thinking of like a, you know, a newsletter that I subscribe to, who's staying on Substack?

And he kind of said, it's sort of like a throwaway line, sort of at the end, he's like, Look, I think probably these Nazis shouldn't be on Substack. I agree with that. But he was also sort of like but I'm also not going to like lose a lot of sleep over it was sort of his point of view and you know, it's part of the thing that I think, you know, helped make it a better and more robust and more thoughtful piece was that I expressed, you know, some ambivalence.

I talked about sort of arguments for and against. I talk about in the piece the contradictions of deplatforming online. I talk about the fight over Palestinian voices in what I consider to be and I've written at length about an ongoing genocide in Gaza being perpetuated by Israel. You know, and I was like, look, these aren't straightforward issues.

But I felt it was important to at least know what we're talking about and what's out there. And then, you know, people can have conversations and Substack can, you know, make its position clear, which ultimately they did. And then people can decide what to do with that. I know it upset a lot of people. And, you know, I was cognizant of the fact that it would, but nonetheless, like, I thought it was important to have the information out there.

Mike Freedman

Well, look, I mean, first of all, I think the speed with which people get upset about insert thing here these days, I don't think the fact that someone gets upset about something is grounds to regret putting it out there. So, you know, and especially because as we've mentioned before, a journalist's job or at least a key part of a good journalist's job is to say things people don't want to hear in places where people don't want them to be.

And that cuts both ways. It should cut both ways if we're going to have a robust and honest conversation about anything. Right.

Jonathan M. Katz

And I should also add, one thing that I was cognizant of for myself was I wasn't doing myself economically any favors by drawing attention to a serious problem on the platform where I publish. And I was also aware and this ended up happening, that other people would note that there could be an economic downside for them and get very mad at me.

And I think that honestly, I think that's a large part of what has happened. I mean, I think people even from right from the beginning, it wasn't within like the first 48 hours, but pretty close to the publication, you know, Matt Taibbi wrote a very angry piece in which he, you know, just tried to fling excrement at me. And, you know, part of what I was taking from his piece there was that he recognized that this could have a negative effect on his financial bottom line. He even, to a much greater extent than I, much greater than almost anybody is extremely financially invested in Substack the brand.

And so he was going to defend the brand and he defended the brand using the language that a certain group of Substackers and you know to to a certain extent the founders used to defend themselves and to promote themselves, that essentially they see Substack as a corrective to the mainstream media. They see it as a tool or a weapon in kind of a sort of dissident discourse, and that they are champions of free speech and free inquiry and that whatever you want to call it, the regime, the cathedral, the people have different terms.

Mike Freedman

Gatekeepers, ivory towers. Yeah, intelligentsia, coastal elites.

Jonathan M. Katz

Ten years ago, it was the lamestream media, the MSM right?

Mike Freedman

Lamestream is not my least favorite pun, though. It's pretty good.

Jonathan M. Katz

It's fine. I mean, yes, it's also accurate often. But I mean, a lot of it is very extremely lame. But regardless, that essentially, you know, that, and you know, the fact that I would like the fact that I published this in The Atlantic, which is a publication that I have had much criticism for over the years, I think well founded, you know, it left me open to, left the article open to that positioning. Oh, look, here comes the big establishment, they're trying to crush little, little me, little Matt Taibbi, who is like the most mainstream of, I mean, he's got a regular spot on an HBO talk show. He like makes millions of dollars, he has a staff, he testifies in front of Congress on a fairly regular basis. He is extremely established. He's extremely mainstream. And it is a very specific lane of the mainstream. But you know, he brands himself as a dissident. And so here he is, the little dissident. And here I am, you know, the big Atlantic writer trying to crush the little guy. And, you know, I don't think that's accurate. I don't think it's a particularly good argument if you actually look at the facts.

But it's also extremely effective branding. And if you think that your bottom line is going to be affected by some sort of criticism against the platform that you are on, why not pull it out? It's right there in the quiver. And so I think that that drove that, and he helped, you know, lay the groundwork for it.

That has driven a lot of the discourse, the capital D Discourse around my piece and what's come since.

Mike Freedman

Since you brought up the question of a bottom line, something that it would be remiss not to mention, but I'm not bringing it up because I'm arguing that it is a major part of it, or could be: Obviously, there is a tussle, so to speak, between what probably the most acceptable term these days is the legacy media and the the so-called new media, which is to say basically maybe not even that independent, because it's still paid for by someone or by subscribers. And in the end, people will naturally end up creating content that people want to see because otherwise they won't pay for it. So there's a lot of arguments that come up that are kind of true until someone succeeds to the point where they need to give the people what they want because there are enough people that they need that money. So I'm not kind of saying that anyone is worse or better than anyone else in that regard, but The Atlantic is a very well-recognized brand in the so-called legacy media.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah.

Mike Freedman

And it is, if we were to assume a kind of zero sum limited amount of time and eyeballs scenario, it is in competition with what is perceived as the new or newer media, and it's not totally missed my notice that since your article, just, on I think it was the 12th of January, The Atlantic published another piece specifically about Substack by Jacob Stern. And so I suppose in the question of the bottom line, people who, as you say, may be defensive of Substack because they don't want it to be seen as a haven for Nazis, because that's also where they live and they don't want people feeling dirty subscribing to them there. And that's one possible motivation for people to be defensive.

But at the same time, it's also a motivation for someone who's in competition with that platform to attack it. Do you think that's a reasonable observation?

Jonathan M. Katz

I mean, I don't know. This is going to sound crazy to some people, people who come to it, to this from a certain point of view. First of all, the legacy media is dying. And to a large extent, it is dead. There's very little of it left. You can look at the statistics.

You look at the number of jobs that are out there. But suffice it to say, some statistic that I saw recently and I'm maybe getting this completely wrong, but it was something like it was like a quarter of all journalists employed in the United States right now are employed by the New York Times or something. It was something crazy like that. Maybe I'm getting this completely wrong. But it was something along those lines because there aren't jobs. But the couple of survivors, and there's a very small number of them, and really The Times is the biggest of all of them, because the Times is really at this point like it's essentially like a gaming company with like a news annex.

I mean, it really is. People subscribe to the Times to play Wordle and and Spelling Bee and get recipes and then like, and then it's like an added bonus to their subscription. They get, you know, the news package.

Mike Freedman

Like getting video with Prime from Amazon.

Jonathan M. Katz

Exactly.

Mike Freedman

The news is the excuse to subscribe, but not the reason.

Jonathan M. Katz

This is deeper than we may want. Again, this is also how it has always worked. I mean, like people used to subscribe to newsletters to get coupons and sports scores and classified ads and and then, you know, they would get with that, you know, news that they were sometimes interested in and sometimes not. But certainly the news didn't tend to pay for itself. It was the fact of the publication, and of the distribution of the paper product that had ads in it. That really is what funded the whole enterprise.

Mike Freedman

It was the thing around the advertising that justified it not just being a supermarket freebie giveaway.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, this is why, you know, we journalists, we wrote this. We wrote the filler between ads on its way to becoming birdcage liner and fish wrap. I mean, that's, many people have said that, this is not original to me. That's how it used to work. And The New York Times is sort of alone in having figured out like a way to sort of read a somewhat dreary model of that in the in the 20th century, or in the 21st century, The Atlantic.

I think, you know, to a lesser extent, it seems to be a survivor at this point. But there are a lot of Atlantic writers. I mean, I can tell you like offhand, because I was reading it last night, James Fallows, a longtime Atlantic writer, probably I think he's still on staff. He has a Substack like, you know, I don't think that these things are necessarily in competition with one another.

I know that like, you know, from being sort of an elder millennial who was in the news industry during the rise of social media, you know, a lot of news properties, a lot of news organizations looked at social media as being a competition for them. And then they realized very quickly that it was actually an asset for them.

And then they had really kind of mixed feelings about it because it was also giving their individual reporters too much power and was making them into public figures who were harder to boss around and whose labor was harder for them to exploit, etc.. So a whole lot of things here. So I just, and I know this sounds like crazy and the fact that it's coming from somebody who had a byline recently in The Atlantic, I think I've written something like five articles for them over eight years or something like that. And they interviewed me once. But you know, somebody who has that in their mind associated with the Atlantic is, you know, I sound like, you know, a wolf in sheep's clothing, right?

But the fact is that the news industry is dying. It is being murdered. It is being murdered by people or by some of the same people who are, you know, the big investors in social media platforms and Substack.

And it is creating a place where, like, you know, journalists like myself, I mean, like, again, I was on Substack and recently left, I'm on Beehiiv now, but I, I was on Substack from, from 2019, from back when people were like, they had no idea what Substack was.

And the fact that I was writing a newsletter, they were like, You're doing a what, what, who, what? This didn't compute. And that has changed to a certain extent. Still, I had a conversation this week with somebody where I just dropped the word Substack in the conversation, they were like, Oh, what? So it still happens.

So I don't think that I have seen evidence that maybe, maybe I'll put it this way, like a little bit more journalistically, I don't see evidence that, you know, The Atlantic feels threatened by Substack, that people are not subscribing to The Atlantic and they're going to newsletters instead. Maybe they do. I don't know.

Maybe you can get Jeffrey Goldberg to come on to your podcast and he will talk about that. But I don't see any evidence of that because among other things, the actual business model that these surviving legacy publications thrive on is their ability to underpay freelancers, to continually be coming to them with content and competing against other freelancers in ways that keep prices down.

And the way that that is possible for them to do that is for us to not all starve to death. And so we have to have some way that we're putting food in our refrigerators and Substack is a way to do that. So if Substack or newsletters or Patreon or, you know, buy me a coffee or whatever, like whatever, you know, modes, freelance journalists have to stay alive and allow us to keep working.

If all of those things went away, a magazine like The Atlantic wouldn't have content because they would be forced to rely, maybe this is less for The Atlantic than others but I think it's probably true for them as well, they would then be forced to rely on their full time employees who require living wages and benefits and parental leave and you know, and all these other things.

Mike Freedman

Or LLMs.

Jonathan M. Katz

Right, exactly. Exactly. So far, The Atlantic has not, I believe, succumbed, but others are. Yeah. That could happen, that could definitely happen. I mean, I don't know if The Atlantic would go for that. But you know, Sports Illustrated recently got caught using AI for articles that nobody reads because Sports Illustrated barely existed anymore, even before it just got killed in the nursing home.

Mike Freedman

Can I ask then just on, on that line of reasoning. There's competition in a bottom line financial way, as you've spoken to. But then we recently had a representative of the Wall Street Journal, I think it was, speaking at Davos, who said that something along the line, I'm not going to pretend to have it verbatim, but something along the lines of we used to control the narrative and the facts and now we don't anymore, and we have to accept that.

Now, I'm not saying that to put words in her mouth in terms of what she might mean by the narrative or by facts. And I'm not suggesting that it means that outlets like the WSJ were lying about things. I'm not getting into that. I guess what I'm saying is there's competition for money, but then there's also kind of competition for ecosystem dominance.

So in terms of when someone says something, who is it that people listen to, who believes the source of the message. And, you know, and in a way, we get into this kind of reputational territory, which is also something I'm curious about, which is more to do with what I see as a perhaps a less genteel way of doing journalism, where people, as they say in soccer terminology, tend to play the man and not the ball, which we can get onto in a moment.

So I guess, the legacy media, which, as you say, are potentially thrashing around, trying to plug a leak that they can't plug financially, but are also seeing their real influence wane over the way that society tells itself the stories that give it a coherent sense of what is happening.

Jonathan M. Katz

I don't know who this person was that you're referencing or what she said.

Mike Freedman

I'll tell you what. If you give me a second, I'll just look it up. I can cut out the pause for sure, because I don't want to misspeak. But it was a direct quote. I saw the actual video clip.

Emma Tucker, Editor-in-Chief of the Wall Street Journal (recording)

If you go back. Really not that long ago, as I say, we kind of we owned the news, we were the gatekeepers. And we very much owned the facts as well. It said it in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they're much more questioning about what we're saying. So it's no longer good enough for us just to say this is what happened, this is the news, we have to explain or almost explain our working so readers expect to understand how we saw stories. They want to know how we go about getting stories. We have to sort of lift the bonnet, as it were, and in a way that newspapers, you know, aren't used to doing and explain to people what we're doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news.

Jonathan M. Katz

I think that she's saying that there is more distrust. There's always been a lot of distrust. Sure. Yeah, but, you know, she's saying and some of that, some of that has been weaponized. I saw this coming. You know, a decade and a half ago, even before Trump, with Sarah Palin, you know, where wherever this is, like it was, from my point of view, was like, oh, of course, there's a politician saying, I don't like the people who report on me. I don't like the people who talk about things that I don't want them to talk about. So don't read them. Listen to me. And she could use new technologies in which she basically had her own printing press and her own television studio in the form of, you know, Facebook at the time and Twitter. And she could just, you know, go directly, you know, unmediated to the people.

But, of course, what that meant was, you know, she's a politician. Politicians lie. And so it was like, of course, I can just lie and I can spin and I can say whatever I want directly to my fans. And there are deeper political dynamics that have grown over the decades. A lot of it comes out of just sort of still seething conservative anger over Watergate and what they see as the president being taken down by the media.

And Roger Ailes at that moment comes up with a plan called, you know, put the GOP on TV, which becomes Fox News under his watch. And the idea is like, you know, you know what? We're never going to let The Washington Post, this is a very oversimplified version of what happened in Watergate, but essentially, from their point of view, it was like we're never going to let The Washington Post take down another Republican president.

We're going to have our own sources of of information. And we are going to, you know, sow mistrust and we're going to create doubt. And this works in large part because it dovetails very nicely with journalistic ethics and journalists' own conception of ourselves. So, I don't know. Emma Tucker. I'm showing my ignorance here that I didn't know who the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal was, but I hadn't even heard of her until you brought up this quote, I don't know how long she's been in her job for. Let me see. Looks like, oh, 2022. That's why, it's not that long anyway. It dovetails very nicely with, with journalists because we like in our conception of ourselves, right, we are always, we have all these like, you know, pithy sayings that you learn in journalism school: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Right. Get a second source. Never assume first, you know, assuming makes an ass out of you and me. All these, like, fun things that we all say to each other and we're constantly checking our own work, we're checking our colleagues work. You know, go back to Watergate. I mean, like in those, you know, in those halcyon days of yore you had, you know, the competition to The Washington Post, which was, you know, primarily The New York Times, you know, a lot of the ways they were in the story and they ended up doing very significant work was because they were in competition. They were trying to beat them. They were also trying to catch them in mistakes. This was a thing on the Haiti cholera story. I mean, I had pushback from, as I noted earlier, from within AP, you know, the AP correspondents who were closer to, you know, senior officials at the U.N. and things like that, they were like, are you sure? We've got this guy in Haiti. He's a kid. He's saying all these crazy things. How could the U.N. have brought cholera to Haiti? I was like, Well, here are the facts. And like, why are you sure about this? What about that? That fact maybe is wrong as well. But no, it's right. And here, like, this is what we do.

Right. And so it was kind of knocking on an open door for people who wanted to sow mistrust to pull from within the profession, the kinds of maybe not mistrust, but a skepticism that is built into the profession, and to enter and to exploit that. And the thing is that and I think this is kind of what Tucker is saying here, but it's certainly what I'm saying, what I've been saying for years, and I've taught journalism and I've been a journalist for over two decades now. You know, the only thing that we have to sell ultimately is trust, right? Because ultimately, especially in print, although increasingly also in visual media, especially with the rise of AI and deepfakes, the only thing that we at the end of the day, at the end of the day, you know, if I go to a U.N. base and I see leaking sewage, the only way that you know that I'm telling the truth is if you trust me and I've earned your trust and I'm sort of re-earning your trust in the story. Right. I've got transparent sourcing. I have facts that can be checked, etc..

Mike Freedman

And also issuing timely and open and accepting corrections. And owning errors, right?

Jonathan M. Katz

Yes. Yeah, but even then, people whose game is to sow mistrust will then try to exploit those structures and those modes of operating. I mean, I can tell you, again, as a journalist, every time I've done a story, especially about a powerful individual or a powerful entity, a powerful corporation, the first thing that they do is try to find something wrong in the story so they can get a correction. And it doesn't matter how minor it is and they try to get a correction appended to it so that they can point to it and say, well, see, that person wasn't careful. They were erroneous.

Just one example, I, you know, for years I ended up reporting a lot on on Duke Energy. It's a power company in the southern United States. And they were just relentless. Anytime I wrote about them, I started covering them because there was a big coal ash spill in North Carolina. And you know, and they were just relentless. They would go through every story with a fine tooth comb and they don't even really care if it's true. Another story I wrote.

Mike Freedman

You said it was potassium nitrate, but it was actually potassium citrate.

Jonathan M. Katz

Exactly. Stuff like that. I did a story in The New York Times magazine about violence and sort of a threatened and partially carried out ethnic cleansing against people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, it was a big feature. And the Dominican government, they, you know, they came with a list of, you know, and a lot of them were just, they were completely, it was just complete B.S. Like it wasn't true or they were just like overinterpreting or whatever. It didn't matter what it was. They just wanted to get, and I don't even think any of them even got in. Maybe, maybe there was a correction. You'd have to look. But like, you know, this was like in an 8000 word story. And, you know, if they can just be like, we spelled the name wrong, then they can use that.

Mike Freedman

He issued a correction, what else did he get wrong? That kind of thing?

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I feel like you're going somewhere with this, so I'm happy to go there with you.

Mike Freedman

Not so much in terms of me having a road map, but I suppose I'll give you an example. Going back to your article in The Atlantic. I agree with you that, first of all, at least I, you know, I'm not a published in mainstream journals guy, but writers don't choose their own titles a lot of the time. They may not decide where the paragraph breaks are. They maybe, subheadings get put in that kind of give it a slightly spicier tone and that may all be done by sub editors or editors. So sometimes people read an article and they think it's saying something or they think it's taking a tone which is actually kind of added in or implied by something that the writer didn't necessarily intend.

And so I think a kind of slightly more patient and generous way of reading in general is probably more helpful. Right? And, and that's my personal view. And the reason I have that is because what I see is a tendency for a kind of combative tone, exactly as you say, a kind of jumping on people, maybe not even if they misspeak, but because they hold a certain position, a kind of pile on mentality that, as you say, these things have been around for a while.

We've always had hysteria, as in mass panics and and public sentiments swinging one way or the other. And this isn't new, but the age of the Internet has amplified these factors. But I suppose where I sit is I, I feel like maybe I am middle enough in terms of many of my views and opinions that I don't see it as a, a malaise or a malady of only one quote side and so I think that what I feel is that there's a kind of elevated sense of stakes that for whatever reason, especially over the past maybe five years, eight years, something like that, it really does seem like when people write whatever it is, opinion pieces, essays, anything, or totally straight reporting, it's like they're fighting something as if they're afraid of what the consequences will be if this is not the hill they die on. And on the other hand, people who take the contrary position will therefore be attacking the person. In a way, it's kind of taken on more of the atmosphere of a battle or a war, rather than the atmosphere of a lot of people bound by curiosity, interest in professional ethics, trying very hard to find out what actually happened and making sure they tell it to people in the clearest language possible.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely like defensive writing. There's a lot that's defensive, right? I mean, this has always been the case to a certain extent, but social media especially exacerbated that. I mean, I think that, and I say this as somebody who, you know, will screenshot and post a screenshot anytime. But screenshots, for instance, have I think created a defensive mentality where it's like you can't even trust, you can't even trust that the context of everything that came before and after it in the piece is going to be allowed to stand on its own, is going to be allowed to color the thing, because somebody is just going to, you know, and I've even written, forgive it. I wrote a thing, you know, not that long ago. Right. I made a comment, I think it was in a newsletter was like, you know, I can feel the cursor, you know, hovering over this paragraph and making a screenshot as we speak, because it's just like you just know somebody is going to just grab a line or a paragraph and they're going to put it in, you know, on Twitter or Substack notes or whatever platform, and they're going to be like, here it is, pile on. And yeah, it's a really bad way to write. It changes the way that people write because then you have to be like, each individual paragraph has to be as airtight as you can make it.

Mike Freedman

But then you also have to be sort of absolute.

Jonathan M. Katz

Not just that, but you also have to be anticipating all of the different things all of these different groups of readers are going to bring to a piece. And that's impossible. Like you can't know what every single person or every single group and sometimes, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll say something, you'll be like, you know, I'm air tight here. I'm making the case, I'm even, you know, taking, you know, this contrary position into account, and there's this other position or whatever that completely blindsides you. It can be infuriating.

Mike Freedman

Well, and it's a tactic that I don't see being a partisan issue. I think it's a tendency of people arguing with each other. And so parsing the point scoring, playing the man not the ball stuff from good faith debate, which can be heated, which can be contentious and controversial and sometimes isn't clear, it can be a grey area of responsibility and fault.

Jonathan M. Katz

And humans are complicated. It's nice, simple as flicking a light switch to figure out what happened in an interview. And if you edit and if you identify somebody as being on your team or against your team in any given situation, that will also color the things that they say. And so if they say something you agree with, they'd be like, well, they didn't mean that, or they meant that. But it's overwhelmed by all of this other stuff, and then if they say something that you dislike, then it's off to the races.

Mike Freedman

Well, and also there's in a way, a kind of a framing issue as you brought it up. A good example in a way specific to where we began our conversation: One of the responses to your article in The Atlantic was an open letter from, I think, over 200 people who were on Substack, so-called Substackers.

Jonathan M. Katz

Right.

Mike Freedman

Who wrote and circulated an open letter called Substackers Against Nazis. And to me, while I understand that that's a very clear, declarative title that stakes the claim to your position, I also felt that it was an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, which is that I don't sincerely believe that the people who, for instance, signed Elle Griffin's open letter, are Substackers For Nazis. But if one takes a position on an issue and says, you know, I'm anti-fascist, once you say that anyone who's arguing with you is linguistically pro-fascist because they're against your antifascist position. Now, that doesn't make them that, right? And it doesn't make you anti-fascist either for calling yourself that. But it's a way of framing debate, which I feel plays into this kind of more heated and more adversarial, less productive way of talking to each other. Do you know what I mean?

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, well, I can tell you, to be fully transparent, I didn't create the Substackers Against Nazis.

Mike Freedman

Oh, no, I wasn't saying you did.

Jonathan M. Katz

But I posted it on my newsletter and I was glad to see it. I was glad to see it. And I was, you know, in touch with the Substack writer, she's also since left the platform, who, you know, was behind that effort. I'm, so I'm aware of the timeline of it. And I can tell you that that letter was done and was being rolled out before the Griffin letter.

Mike Freedman

Oh, that they were kind of simultaneous maybe.

Jonathan M. Katz

Or they were simultaneous from, from the point of view of the people who, you know, or at least a lot of the people who shared the Substackers Against Nazis letter, that the Elle Griffin letter read as a kind of a prebuttal that they had sort of, you know, gotten out ahead of it. Part of the evidence of that is that, so in the piece that Matt Taibbi wrote in which he just, you know, tried to have it out with me titled, I think he called me a tireless busybody or something like that. Well, you know, I mean it's just really fast. So in that post he talks about the fact that he was aware that there was an open letter that was in the works. So they knew about the open letter that the Substackers Against Nazis were doing. But I'm pretty sure, I don't know what every single person who ended up sharing the Substackers Against Nazis letter knew, but I didn't know until Elle's letter or the letter on Elle's blog came out, I didn't know that there was going to be this competing letter. Which is to say, and I listened to as you know, and as you noted, your interview with Elle, you know, I think she sort of implied or said at some point that, you know, calling that subsequent letter Substackers Against Nazis was a comment on her letter. But it wasn't. It was a comment on Nazis. It was, of course, building off of my reporting.

Mike Freedman

That's a good piece of additional context to have. But in a way, it's also and that's not, I'm not saying people shouldn't have called it that, I'm not shoulding on anyone, but just going back to this point about how we speak to each other, how we write, how we try and elucidate the situation in the world around us.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah.

Mike Freedman

Like with Matt Taibbi. Matt, I've read Matt Taibbi for a long time. I'm a big fan of his writing. I think he's a fantastic journalist. He's broken some great stories. He wrote one of my favorite phrases in the English language when he called Goldman Sachs a giant vampire squid on the face of humanity, jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. Word poetry. Diamonds. And he's also been very active, working on issues around, I'm going to say, censorship, because that's the simplest word for it. But talking about what happened under the bonnet at Twitter and so forth. And so I think he's, and you called him out earlier saying that he's kind of big time, he's testified in front of Congress. But in context, he testified in front of Congress specifically about the censorship issue with the so-called Twitter Files. He was asked to go there by a House committee, and he was actually called a so-called journalist by one of the people who were on that committee who didn't like what he was saying. And while he was there, the IRS went to his house and left him a threatening letter which made no sense because they actually owed him money. It's a very kind of muddy situation for him. So, yeah, again, that's kind of what I mean.

Jonathan M. Katz

That reporting that he was doing was, he was effectively given documents by a billionaire who was trying to create a narrative at the company that he had just bought. He has done good journalism before. I, you know, he lost me at one point.

Mike Freedman

But that's fair enough. I'm not anyone's PR agent or defender. I guess what I mean is again, so for instance, Elon Musk buying Twitter and releasing the Twitter Files. Yes. Elon Musk is a very wealthy man. Yes, there are implications of the policy that's happening at Twitter right now, which are worth discussing. I think it's something you mentioned actually in your article to do with censoring on behalf of Turkey and India, but claiming the mantle of free speech. And that is definitely a valid statement. But I don't know if it's an entirely fair characterization and only because I'd say Turkey and India, like China and other countries, often force their own norms around what they permit to be shared in their country onto the companies that transact in their countries. So in essence, it seemed like a kind of loaded statement, because I'd rather have a country that was freer where people get to say stuff, even if it's nasty, but if that company is doing business in a more censorious country, they have to be a business and obey the rules of that country. Even though I don't like that, I don't like censorship, I don't like that idea, I think the idea that they should censor more because they do it elsewhere, I'm not saying that's what you were saying, but it's one of the kind of shadow parts of the the way it was written.

Jonathan M. Katz

But, this is maybe a little off topic, but that's the heart of the critique of the so-called Twitter Files. You had a government who, from the point of view of Elon Musk and the people behind the Twitter Files, not all of whom were journalists, I mean, Michael Shellenberger has kind of become a journalist, but he describes himself as a PR professional and he's been a politician, and he's sort of being more of a journalist now, I guess, than he has been, but I'm not defending the so-called journalist as statement. But in his case, I think it is more appropriate than Taibbi's. But regardless, you know, the critique of the Twitter Files was that you had a government that was working with a social media platform. And so it's the same thing, I mean, except it's worse, right? Because in the case of the United States, you know, even in what the Twitter Files showed, you know, it showed that they weren't, you know, calling the shots. In fact, they were often very frustrated with Twitter for not doing what they wanted. Whereas in the case of Turkey and India in particular, it seems like Elon just did what they wanted, no questions asked, at least until the next tranche of Twitter Files comes out.

Mike Freedman

But also, you know this, the Twitter Files are from before Elon bought it.

Jonathan M. Katz

No, I know. I know. I'm saying that if somebody, you know, makes public his documents the way they did, the documents of the previous Twitter owners, that he selected or hand-picked people who he knew were going to tell a story that he wanted told and then made sure that they had access to pick whatever they wanted that went into the narrative that they wanted told. And that's essentially what comes out of the Twitter Files.

Mike Freedman

Can I ask you a genuine question?

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah.

Mike Freedman

If you had gotten that call, would you have gone?

Jonathan M. Katz

If I got a call from Elon Musk to work for him?

Mike Freedman

No, not work for. Not for. If you'd gotten a call that just said, I've got a bunch of internal documents from Twitter and I want to give them to some journalists who can then interpret them and understand them and write about them, as long as the first version of the story is released on Twitter, and after that, run with it to your heart's content.

Jonathan M. Katz

No, I don't think, I think honestly, I would have, if he was like, I would have wanted a lot more guarantees of freedom, independence, including the ability to to publish it wherever I wanted.

Mike Freedman

They have been able to publish afterwards. It was only, I think, the first that I as far as I'm aware, the only condition was the first story from each batch of documents should be released on Twitter in the initial round. But since then I think they've been running with it on their own Substacks.

Jonathan M. Katz

I would have also asked myself a question which I ask anytime somebody comes to me with information, it's like, why are you coming to me with this? Why me? Like, what? What? You know, because clearly there's often, you know, implicit in choosing the journalist that you want to tell the story that you want told you are doing so because you think that they are going to tell the story the way that you want it told.

Mike Freedman

But wouldn't that also be true for any journalist who receives a leak from, say, a White House staffer? Or a CIA analyst or something?

Jonathan M. Katz

But it's generally, just speaking personally, generally not the way I work. Information that I get is generally not you know, it's generally not handed to me.

Mike Freedman

Not from the VIP area.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, when you're talking about Watergate, I mean, it's really interesting. Like, you know, the degree to which and this only became common knowledge very late in life once the source known as Deep Throat, Mark Felt, was unmasked. It really comes out the extent to which Bob Woodward's reporting in particular was access journalism, that it was a highly placed source in a government agency sharing information for his own purposes. And then the other people did other reporting. I mean, you've seen that in Bob Woodward's career. So I don't mean to be shitting on Bob Woodward, but like Bob Woodward's career since, like the things that he has done since Watergate, they tend to be access journalism. They tend to be you know, he is welcomed into, you know, George W Bush's White House or the Supreme Court or whatever. And, you know, there's a value to that. It's not generally what I do. I'm not somebody who, I don't generally get a call from somebody who's like, you know, I'm the CEO of this company, I've got all of my predecessors' emails and would you like them? Because, and part of the reason I don't work that way and I'm being really honest, I think part of the reason I, and some people do, I mean, there are good journalists who do, Bob Woodward is one of them, but part of the reason I don't work that way is because it's a mode of work that makes you beholden, whether you like it or not, in a lot of ways, to the person who is giving you the access. Because if you report something that they don't want, your access is cut off or they will undercut you or they will give it to your competition or whatever, and you will just feel you know, you will feel the impulse to, to some extent, tell a story that they are happy with.

I don't like working that way. But also it doesn't matter because he wouldn't call me.

Mike Freedman

I agree with your point, your concerns about access journalism. And I think in a way, going back to this question of how we as a kind of community of people on this planet trying to understand reality as accurately as possible, I'd like to believe that's ultimately our shared goal, I don't mean just you and I, but I'm speaking in a general sense. You know that criticism you just made of that type of journalism? You know who else I've heard make that case very forcefully, very eloquently and very passionately? Matt Taibbi.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, well.

Mike Freedman

And so this is kind of what I mean is, going back to this question of trust, this question of where people get their information.

Jonathan M. Katz

And I think he changed. I mean, I don't want to get into like a long conversation about Taibbi but he, I don't think the Matt Taibbi of twenty or ten years ago and the Matt Taibbi of today are necessarily, things haven't remained constant. But people change. I change. I mean, everybody changes. I don't think the Matt Taibbi of 2008 would have taken an invitation from a billionaire to tell a story on his platform using documents that he was fed. I don't think I've ever actually Matt Taibbi in person, we've had interactions online, but I don't think he would have done that. But maybe he would and he can speak for himself. I'm not sure.

Mike Freedman

So I mean to return to maybe something more tightly in the wheelhouse, I suppose, when you look at the way you've developed as a journalist, the way that you've experienced pushback from organized nations or individuals in positions of influence, and as you say, we all change, we all develop, and in a way, I think that's also something that comes up commonly, is the You've Changed Man thing, which is, I'd rather have someone who develops and owns it than insists on a type of consistency that keeps them frozen in amber regardless of what they learned in the intervening period.

Jonathan M. Katz

The hobgoblin of little mind.

Mike Freedman

So, so, I mean, from your perspective, how has what you do changed in terms of the way you choose stories, what you want to focus on and how you express it, like we've talked about, right? Sometimes there is a type of Internet voice, there's a type of writing that is now kind of required because of the tone of what gets published and who publishes it, and it gets edited as you say, editorial meetings. People have their own idea of what's appropriate. So from your perspective, when you think about how you've moved through your career and developed, what's changed for you?

Jonathan M. Katz

I mean, the things I write are extremely different from the kinds of journalism that I was doing in the eight years that I worked for the Associated Press, which is the wire service, still exists and it's still big, although it's shrinking. Shrinking like everything else. You know, when I was at AP, you know, the word 'I' never could have appeared in a story. When I would be in, in a situation, for instance, in Haiti, there's a, you know, one example that I often call to, well, basically anything that happened to me, I would write about it in the third person if it was important enough to include in a story. So if I was covering a riot that happened and I was robbed at a barricade, which I was at one point, I wrote about it in the third person. I was like, “an Associated Press reporter had his BlackBerry stolen at a barricade, at knifepoint” or something like that.

Mike Freedman

And his hand is hurting while he is typing this.

Jonathan M. Katz

Fortunately, my hand was fine, but, you know, things like that. Right. And, you know there was a kind of defensive writing in a way, but it wasn't defensive against, like, you know, online sparring. It was defensive towards the parties of a story. You know, you're making sure that material facts, that like we included, you know, the point of view of, you know, a person who is, you know, even though my evidence shows that the U.N. is likely responsible for this cholera outbreak, here's the U.N. response, right. You had to have it in there. But it's different now. I'm much more of a poster after, you know, whatever, it's been 14 years of social media poisoning.

Mike Freedman

It's metastasized.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah. And also, I mean, the things I write, I used to be a beat reporter even when I was you know, when I was a foreign correspondent, you know, when I was in Israel during the second intifada, one of my first gigs actually at AP, you know, I was covering that, when I was in Haiti I was covering, you know, it was very, very intense. Obviously, I lived in Port au Prince. I was very intense on the Haiti story. And whatever was happening in Haiti, that was my beat. And I had sources who were placed, you know, who I cultivated. And I would go out and I would observe things and that was my focus.

Whereas now, you know, as has sort of developed, especially over the last five years since I started doing my newsletter, I'm first of all, it's much more of like an opinion section, the things I write are much more kind of like op eds and I also write actual op eds. That's, I think I would have never done that as a reporter back in the day. And that allows me to be more opinionated. It allows me to offer things that, you know, I try to be well sourced, I try to have all my facts in order, I make a very great effort. And this piece that brings me here today, contrary to some intimations, in some cases direct statements that have been made online, it was rigorously fact checked by The Atlantic's fact check team. And even before it gets to The Atlantic's fact check team, I am an obsessive self fact checker. I can tell you, for instance, in my books, my publishing houses don't hire fact checkers. I hire them out of my own pocket. For Gangsters of Capitalism, I hired four fact checkers, which was not cheap, really good ones, one of whom is one of the head research editors at New York Times Magazine, before that, he was at The New Yorker, and I gave them, you know, very specific marching orders, like destroy this book, find every weak point, find anything that might be some kind of unintentional plagiarism, anything, anything that I get wrong here, fight me on. And there were fights with my own fact checkers throughout. That's how I operate.

And I think that hasn't changed. But you know what to do with those facts, you know, I'm then able to sort of, you know, make arguments which, you know, ten, 15 years ago, maybe closing in on 15 years ago now, I would have been allergic to doing, like coming out in a story and and saying that, this guy is, this Haitian politician is very dangerous, just sort of as my opinion. That's something I wouldn't have done. And, you know, that's changed because of social media. It changed in a lot of ways because of the Trump years, because, you know, with Donald Trump, as a journalist, I was faced with somebody who it was very obvious to me very much from the beginning of his first candidacy in 2015, and I cannot believe that we are in the middle of his third candidacy. That is crazy to me. It was very obvious to me what was going on, that this guy was trafficking in open racism, that he was selling himself as an authoritarian who, you know, “I alone,” as he said at the Republican National Convention in 2016, you know, “can fix it.”

That was what we were dealing with here. And a lot of my colleagues in the press, still to this day, a lot of my colleagues in the press, back then there were huge fights over like if we could say that he was lying. People would be like, well, we don't know what's in his heart, maybe he thinks these things are true and so we can't call them lies. And it's like, I think we could call them lies because either he knows he's lying in a lot of cases or he does it because he's not bothering to check. But regardless, we know that this isn't true. So let's just call it a lie and just be clear about that. And things like that sort of pushed me to a more aggressive, more opinionated kind of, you know, Matt Taibbi type of writing than I was doing before. One of the reasons that I really admired Taibbi back when I was sort of a straight news reporter was because I would have loved to be able to, you know, to write, I don't know about that line in particular, but, you know, things like the vampire squid line. I would have gotten fired not just because I would have been engaging in ad hominem attacks or whatever but just because it's not the kind of writing that AP does, they would just be like, you can do that kind of writing, but you just have to go somewhere else to do it.

And I always really admired people who could do things like that. And now I'm doing that to a much greater extent. Other ways in which I've changed are, you know, I doubt very many people who are listening to this are very familiar with my work, but if they are and they've been reading me for many years, maybe they can tell me other ways in which I've changed that I'm not cognizant of, but those are some examples.

Mike Freedman

Well, I'm really grateful for you sharing that as openly as you did, because in a way, I suppose that's part of what has come up. Earlier when I was talking about a more adversarial bent in the way reporting is done, a greater sense of mission among a lot of journalists in terms of what they think they're trying to achieve with what they say and what they publish, and when we talk about the question of trust, I guess that's also something that comes in here, as you brought up the Trump years, I'd say it would be disingenuous to ignore that 2016 feels like an inflection point, right?

Jonathan M. Katz

Oh yeah.

Mike Freedman

That after 2016, with Trump and Brexit and the kind of few years we had between that and the pandemic, it definitely felt like there was a kind of gloves off moment where suddenly, to the extent that objectivity was ever a real and meaningful outcome, it was previously ethically encouraged. And I think that's a reasonable point. And I feel like we shifted, as you described for yourself, into a more subjective mode, however understandably, on a personal level. But for many people, myself included, what that shift did do is perhaps affect the level of trust that's instinctively possible when you know someone is writing from a passionate, personally convictioned place.

Jonathan M. Katz

My ideas about objectivity have also changed over the course of my career. And a lot of that actually has more to do with my experience as a foreign correspondent because I found myself, so, you know, I reported, from an American reporter from the United States before I went overseas for the longest stint, I was in Israel and Palestine before I then came back. And then I reported from Capitol Hill, first for Congressional Quarterly and then for the Associated Press and broke actually a fairly big story at the time that the then Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, had sold off all of his family's stock or all the stock in his family's hospital company right before a major price decline in preparation for a presidential run. This seemed like a big story at the time because he was considered the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, which people today would say Bill who?

Mike Freedman

Wait, are we not allowed to be nostalgic for a time when insider trading by members of Congress was considered controversial?

Jonathan M. Katz

I know. I know. Yeah, but then I moved overseas, and one of the things was that being, you know, reporting from, especially in Latin America and especially in Haiti, I was expected to not necessarily sit in judgment, but just follow the facts wherever they led, especially when it came to talking about the Haitian government in a way that when talking about American politics, you were much more expected to the mode of objectivity, or what people considered objectivity was much more of what has since been termed both-sides-ism.

Mike Freedman

Sorry, just real quick, when you say expected, you mean by your editors or you mean by?

Jonathan M. Katz

By editors and also by audiences. Because it was like, you know, if you said the Republicans are telling the truth and the Democrats are lying in this instance, then that was considered not objective. By sort of the American rules of the game, and from American perspective, that seems like partisan journalism, right? Whereas when reporting on another country, people don't care, because I'm reporting for a global audience, I'm reporting for especially an American audience with AP, people don't care about internal Haitian politics. I feel fairly confident that you probably couldn't name any Haitian political parties, which is not a moral failing on your part, you just don't know anything about it, which is fine. It's a big world out there. So like the idea that you're really, you know, in the tank for one party over another, it's not a thing that anyone's going to care about, right? And so I was much more expected to just be like, Well, what are the facts, man? Like, what's happening here? And I followed that. I took that and ran with it. And we've brought it up a million times here, but certainly with regard to the earthquake, I didn't get the earthquake's comment on the 100,000 to 360,000 people that...

Mike Freedman

The tectonic plate was unavailable for comment.

Jonathan M. Katz

The North American plate was unavailable for comment because it was sliding under the Caribbean. But then, you know, throughout that year and throughout the reporting that I was doing in Haiti in general, I just reported, you know, I just reported critically on NGOs. I reported critically on the U.N. with the cholera epidemic. I reported very critically on Bill Clinton, one of sort of the moments in which I realized that perhaps I had been in Haiti too long and I was a little burned out was when I interrupted Bill Clinton at one of his own press conferences in Haiti, because I asked a question and he started answering it and I just interrupted and I was like, that's not what I asked, and everyone else kind of turned around and I was like, stop lying to me, man! It was a different vision. There's different ways to talk about it. You know, to a certain extent, I came to reject neutrality. I came to reject, I came to reject both-sides-ism.

But I became much more committed to following the facts wherever they land, regardless of who it pissed off and regardless, honestly, of the professional or financial implications for me. And I think that for me again this may sound crazy, I don't even know who's still listening to this podcast, but so many people have accused me in writing this piece of like, Oh, I did it for clout. Oh, I did it for money. I did get paid for the article. To be perfectly fair, I don't get paid like a ton. I didn't get paid an amount that's going to offset the number of subscriptions and the growth that I'm losing from from leaving Substack. And I don't know if we have time, but I can talk about the reasons because it wasn't, it wasn't just a Nazi thing. And in fact, that was in some ways subordinate to the reasons I left the platform. But I shat where I ate and I don't care because it's the only way that I know how to work. If I find information and I think it's interesting and I think that it is in any way productive to report on it in kind of a pro-social sense, I'm going to do it even if it makes me look bad, even if it hurts my bottom line, even if it means that I can't work at the places that I've been working. I mean, just to use another example, you know, one of the first pieces that I did on my Substack, one of the ones that went viral early on, was I did a piece in my Substack about the ways in which The New York Times threw some very shoddy reporting, had created the illusion of support for the notion that Donald Trump wasn't just making shit up when he said that there were very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville. And I called out in my newsletter Jeremy Peters and The New York Times in general, because they had engaged in what I considered to be and what I found to be shoddy and incomplete reporting that created a false impression. At that time, my principal employer as a freelancer, my principal client essentially was The New York Times. I mean, for years, I was effectively, you know, like the New York Times's North Carolina correspondent. And because I was there a lot and reporting from there a lot and, you know, I don't think it was just that reporting, but sort of the cumulative effect of me calling out The New York Times and their reporting failures in my newsletter and on my social media account has had the effect that I don't really write very much for The New York Times anymore. And I'm sure that my family would rather that I had made different decisions about things like that, but I just can't operate any differently. It's the only way that I know how to operate. The only way I know how to operate as a journalist is to learn information, synthesize it, and whether I'm doing it in a straight news story or I'm doing it in a more opinionated piece, put it out to the world without fear or favor, to use another journalistic cliche.

And again, I'm sure people are going to be listening to this like, you're completely full of shit, Katz, what are you talking about? But if I'm full of shit then I'm bullshitting myself because this is how I think I work. And to me, this story that we're here talking about is another example of it, because all it did was make enemies for me on Substack.

It certainly did nothing to ingratiate myself to the Substack leadership who run a social network in which they make editorial decisions about who to promote, who to ratchet up, who to recommend to people and who not. And ultimately, I decided really on just like my own personal ethical grounds that I couldn't be on Substack anymore, for which I am knowingly taking a financial hit because the Substack network effect, which wasn't in place in the first couple of years that I was on Substack, does fuel a lot of growth and I have no doubt that I am going to have fewer subscribers in a year than I would have if I had stayed on the platform and other people are looking at the same information that I am, they maybe even agree with me, they agree with my position, that it's not good to have like actually National Socialist Nazis on a newsletter platform or being promoted by or in the case of what Mackenzie did that really shot him in the foot.

And this was just a complete unforced error on his part coming out with the statement in which he just said, like, we don't like Nazis, but they are welcome on our platform, which is something that no other social media organization, not even Elon Musk, who reinstated the accounts of known neo-Nazis, not even he was like, I think it's important to have Nazis on my platform. It created a very bad effect. I got a lot of unsubscriptions and other people did as well. You know, I stirred that pot. I am dealing with the consequences of that. But I don't care because I think that it is important enough to note that there is a real and pervasive issue and that I thought that it was important enough to do that, even though I think that ultimately probably didn't win me a ton of friends and it isn't going to make me a lot of money in the long run. It's actually gonna cost me money in the short and medium term.

Mike Freedman

Something that seems to be at the heart of a lot of the contentiousness around conversations about who should be on a platform, who should be heard, who shouldn't be heard, it can be reduced to calling it a free speech issue, but it also ties in with things that have come up during our conversation about trust, about people speaking to each other across the lines of disagreement.

And increasingly also we see worldwide a ramping up of government rules around what is being classed as hate speech or misinformation and so on. And I suppose to me, besides my own personal feelings about freedom of speech, which probably veers towards the absolutist, there's also the fact that it seems like the best way of getting people to trust in the ecosystem in which they're receiving their information.

And so, for example, is it better that Nazis only meet in a basement, under a warehouse by the docks where nobody knows they're there or how many people are there, or is it better that they have a list of subscribers, a database, and everyone can go and see what they're saying to each other? Like with the way we began and now moving towards wrapping up, shining a light on the fact that extremism, unsavory opinions, outright racism, other stuff is there and is present and is concerning, and people who feel that way and think that way and speak that way, it's unpleasant to know that it's out there, especially if you're a member of one of the groups that they dislike. It can be scary, it's uncomfortable, and it can be downright disgusting.

And maybe I'm being naive, but I still don't feel like any of that is a reason for it to be gone, if you see what I mean. And I'm not saying that because I think it's an easy thing to say, I don't think it's a black and white issue. But to me, we approach a bright line where countries that tend to be dangerous for the most vulnerable or for the people who are dissenting against the majority opinion or the government, countries that are dangerous in that way tend to be countries that limit what can be said and determine what the acceptable parameters of debate are, and also sometimes even determine what is true or what constitutes acceptable facts rather than unacceptable facts. And it seems to me to be approaching worldwide a situation where there is a growing, often very emotional, often understandable from a certain perspective, dislike for so much of what goes on and gets said and causes distress to people that we risk crossing a line from which we don't walk back easily, into a situation where real power, the power that's enforced by military and police and the machinery of the state, real power gets to determine what people can and cannot say. And so in a way, I think maybe some of the pushback and negativity you've received might be from people who, even if that wasn't your intention, kind of accuse you of being the thin end of a wedge, the other end of which is this thing I'm talking about. And I don't think that concern is ill founded, even if the way it's expressed to you or blaming you as if you're somehow in cahoots with some agenda is off base. Do you see what I mean?

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah. I mean, I can respond a couple different ways. So first of all, I think it's very important to sit in the discomfort and the ambiguity of all of this because it is very, very difficult. These are very, very difficult questions. I mean, just use an example and I believe this is a case you're familiar with of Rwanda, right? I mean, that's a situation where you had, you know, mass media directly sparking, perpetuating and giving marching orders to a genocide. Then that genocide ends. Everybody who's dead is dead, is not coming back. The Kagame government comes into power and then sort of on the pretense, and maybe pretense is too unfair a word, they're basing this on real things that really happened with Radio Mille Collines and things like that, but then they use that to then suppress speech that is of Kagame, who becomes a dictator effectively, at least as an unaccountable authoritarian president. And to the extent that, and people have written about this at length, you know, even getting real information about the genocide in Rwanda is difficult because speech is so narrowly constrained that even true facts about the genocide, which is perpetrated by the victims of the genocide, were to a great extent the people who are in power now. Because of fears of, you know, whatever you call it, genocidal ideation or division or whatever, divisiveness, they try to, they restrict even talking about ethnic or supposed ethnic differences within the Rwandan body politic in a way that makes it very difficult to even talk about what happened.

So that's just like a case where, what the hell do you do with that? Right? Because, like, I'm the one, like on the one hand and like I can tell you, I'm familiar with some of the discourse around it, I was reading a thing, it was like FIRE, freedom of whatever it is.

Mike Freedman

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Greg Lukianoff.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yes, exactly. You know FIRE. I wrote a thing. I read this a little while ago, so if I'm misremembering it, please correct me or forgive me. But you know, they made a point, that what Radio Mille Collines did wouldn't have passed the Brandenburg test, referring to the Supreme Court case in which, you know, speech could only be prohibited by the American state if they're fighting words that mean an imminent threat of specific violence against specific, like in the Brandenburg case, the guy was basically just sort of like, you know, we must kill blacks and Jews. But they were like, in the case of Rwanda, they were like and this is the address, these are the names of people. And so FIRE is saying, this isn't really even a question of freedom of speech, because Brandenburg would hold. But, of course, if you're a real free speech absolutist, like 100%, then even Brandenburg should be too far for you. Because then you're against anybody saying anything, right? All I'm trying to say here, and maybe people are going to accuse me, I'm talking defensively, or maybe people are going to accuse me of being intentionally obfuscating or obtuse or talking around this issue, but these are very, very complicated issues. Talk about Nazis and swastikas, specifically talk about the thing that we're actually talking about here, right? The actual Nazis. The Nazis qua Nazis. The clicking heels, swastika-sporting Nazis, and people who are part of neo-Nazi movements, even though they don't have swastikas on their Substack.

But they're very clearly identified. And we know who they are. I talk about some of them in The Atlantic piece because they were in Charlottesville, they're defendants in Sines v. Kessler, the case against the perpetrators of Unite The Right. You know, in those cases, what they want ultimately, what that political tendency wants is to become an authoritarian superstate in which they get to decide what everybody else says and who is suffered to live and who can be killed at will. And this is a very famous issue. And they're different people. Your Karl Popper, that's different people with different opinions about this, about So what do you do if you know the people who are trying to use free speech, you know, claims of free speech are trying to use that as a thin wedge to get themselves in.

And especially given the fact that, you know, that it is very clear to me that there is a large and powerful authority, I'm not saying that Donald Trump is a Nazi, okay? I am saying that there is within the Republican Party, first of all, he's an authoritarian who wants to be a singular authoritarian. And there is a large growing wave of people with a various spectrum of authoritarian ideas that go all the way to, you know, Ron DeSantis, his campaign having these underground videos that were made by and approved by the campaign that included Nazi iconography.

So I think that's real, right? So that's a thin wedge of its own. I don't know. I don't know the answer in a broader societal sense, about whether, you know, the answer to that is, I feel like it is not criminalizing speech. I think that, as an American or my bias as a journalist who grew up really revering the First Amendment, I don't see that as an answer. But I do think that it is a lot more within the realm of conversation. If we're talking about a platform, a platform like Substack not allowing itself to be used as a fundraising tool and also as a dissemination tool, not just because it is using sort of the power of the Internet or, you know, Twitter-like powers to just put stuff out there in the ether. It's email delivery. It is infrastructure to create mailing lists and disseminate views. And like, yeah, Nazis have a right to talk and, you know, you say it's better to have them out in the open. First of all, I don't know the extent to which they're out in the open. To me, one of the criticisms I know, Elle Griffin made this criticism of my piece on your podcast, she was like, well I wouldn't have even known that these people exist if Jonathan Katz hadn't found them, which first of all, I don't think that just because you don't know something exists doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just because you didn't know it existed. I mean, there's something important, but also that kind of obviates your point because it's like a lot of people just didn't know that they were out there until I shine a light on it, like you in that interview, you know, you used the Louis Brandeis line, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And he goes on to talk about publicity, that was what my piece was doing. I was bringing sunlight into a dank corner of Substack and shining a light on it. We could talk about the origins of that, of that idea and its limits, but regardless, that's what I was doing.

And the other thing is, and I, you know, this also goes into even, you know, one's reverence for absolutism, for the First Amendment, and I talk about this in the Atlantic piece: Substack has a First Amendment right to allow anything on its platform that it wants and to disallow anything on its platform that it wants because there's Supreme Court cases. There was a famous one involving the Miami Herald in the 1970s where the state of Florida tried to mandate that the Miami Herald publish a response to an op ed, I believe it was, and the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. You can't force a publication to print anything, because that is its First Amendment right. It's right of free speech, it's freedom of the press, it is freedom of association.

Mike Freedman

Well, that's compelled speech, right? Compelling speech is as unfree as restricted speech.

Jonathan M. Katz

Exactly So in the case of Substack and again, I'm going back to sort of my initial ambiguities, I don't know what to do with all this stuff. Some of these cases are just so obvious that even Substack, after coming out and making a statement that ended up with a headline in the New York Times that had the word Substack and Nazi next to each other, basically Substack welcomes Nazis, right, even after that Substack then had to backpedal and be like, well, it was five sites, they were like evil, okay, so there are five sites there, yeah, that's pretty bad, even they had to be like there's other things that are just sort of like swelling traffic and anti-Semitism.

You have a huge subscriber base, you're making a bunch of money or you're literally Richard Spencer and you have a Substack bestseller badge, or you are literally a front for an unknown neo-Nazi group that also has a Substack bestseller badge. Like, what do you do with that? I don't know. I don't have a good answer. I do not have a good answer.

But what I do know is that talking about it, in terms of the narrow case that you're making, that it's better to know where they are, I don't agree because I don't think, first of all, that putting the power of a platform behind them is necessary. I don't think helping them to make money is necessary.

Mike Freedman

I mean, the making money thing. Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, just to kind of step into what you were saying. I think that the making money angle goes to places that may seem like it's a slippery slope argument, but I don't believe it's disingenuous. Before there was an Internet, there were newsletters. Newsletters that were printed on paper that was bought from stores. Printed in printers' shops that sold the service that they did, sent through the post and envelopes that were bought from stationery stores using stamps that were bought from the post office. You know what else Nazis use? Electricity. They wear shoes. I find it, for me, it's a queasy thing when we begin to think about the idea that essentially making money from fellow citizens who hold unacceptable opinions should be socially unacceptable and or legally prevented. I'm not saying you're taking that position...

Jonathan M. Katz

But I don't think it should be illegal. Let me put it this way. I don't think it should be illegal at all. I just don't want to be associated with writing on a platform that says you can do it here. Right? Like, it's one thing to, you know, make your own server, put your own email list together, send your email out to people and they can Venmo you money, whatever. Like if you want to do that, that's fine. And also there are other platforms out there that allow that sort of thing. Substack is one of them very explicitly.

Mike Freedman

Substack and Beehiiv that you switched to may very well share something like AWS, which is the back end for U.S. Internet companies. This is what I mean. Once we go, and I'm not suggesting that you haven't thought of that, or that you're yadda-yadda-ing that, but just that's what I mean, when we really open up that can of worms, when we really walk through that door, it just feels a lot like, and again, I'm not putting it on you, it's my impression, a kind of social credit thing.

Jonathan M. Katz

A loaded term, but yes.

Mike Freedman

I use it advisedly in the sense that what I mean by it is a situation in which the social acceptability and general public or government approval of one's behavior and statements and actions begins to govern the degree to which you can actually live your life in society and interface with society economically and autonomously. I think that once we open that can of worms, we walk through that door, we are really not making a different argument to that, we're just talking about degree, not framework, if you see what I mean.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, to a certain extent. But I mean, there are other ways of looking at this and talking about it. I mean, it's, you know, if putting yourself out there as a platform on which Nazis, literal Nazis, I mean, Hamish said, that's right, literal Nazis are welcome to grow their email lists, monetize, make money, that is a message to other people, including people who Nazis victimize, that maybe you're not welcome here and maybe Substack isn't saying like, you know, you as a trans person, you as a person of color, whatever, you as a Jewish person, you can come here and do the same thing, but you just might not feel welcome on it. Your potential subscriber base may not feel welcome supporting you. And part of the reason is because it's not just that these are competing ideas and competing world views, the reason why Nazis and free speech intersect in these conversations so often is because it is such a strong and very clear example of a violently illiberal worldview whose ultimate goal is mass murder, or at least the forcible legal exclusion in using the resources of the state of people with whom it disagrees or whom it thinks shouldn't exist or shouldn't exist within within the country in which they find themselves. And what do you do with that? Like the problem is that as a social network, their recommendation features, they have a Twitter clone, they make recommendations, they have their own podcast, they have their own newsletters in which they recommend places, once you have that infrastructure saying, we think that we should both have people who like write about whatever and we should also have people who want to murder all Jews.

Mike Freedman

People who read Knitting Weekly also read Death to the Jews.

Jonathan M. Katz

Right. Those two things can't exist in the same place.

Mike Freedman

They can't?

Jonathan M. Katz

I don't think so. No. Well the knitting, yes, you could have Nazi knitters.

Mike Freedman

Crocheting swastikas.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, yeah. But what I'm saying is that at a certain point, you have to choose. When I say in the same place, we're talking about a platform, I'm not talking about in a society. Within a society, you know, the problem is when that illiberal authoritarian fascist group gains enough purchase, gains enough numbers, gains enough material, enough armament, enough political power that they can actually start putting some of their views into practice, at that point you can't have both, right? Like if we're talking about actual Nazi Germany, right? Or pre-Nazi Germany.

Mike Freedman

Leaving an ideology that gains enough momentum and backing that it can capture all of the institutions and mechanisms that would otherwise protect people from it and it becomes impossible to coexist.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, because at that point, you don't have a liberal society anymore.

Mike Freedman

But that was also true, for example, of the Bolshevik takeover in Russia that became the Soviet Union. It was the case in many countries with various dictatorships, not all of which would be characterized as right wing, right? But all of whom, in a way, and this is the beauty of Orwell's work and the reason behind the name [of the podcast] in part, they have certain mechanical or structural similarities.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yes. I mean there's a reason why Hannah Arendt coined the term totalitarianism to basically describe both Stalin and Hitler because they have a lot in common and they were allies for a while and they jointly invaded Poland.

Mike Freedman

I guess what I mean is by bringing that up, it's not, and again, it's not to tar with a broad brush, but simply to say that there are a number of organizations that speak either openly and passionately about their alignment with, say, for example, communist ideas or Marxist ideas, all of which in a way, if taken to the same logical conclusion as you were describing in Nazism, is going to entail a lot of the same elements: The inability to coexist with liberal ideas, the mass murder of individuals who disagree, and so on and so forth. Here we don't see a pushback or an anxiety around those organizations simply because they identify as Marxist or communist or anarchist.

Jonathan M. Katz

Anarchism is quite literally the opposite of that, right? In that they're against any control.

Mike Freedman

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I guess what I mean is I put it in there because in the sense of a kind of direct action, an anarchist movement of the removal of a central authority in a country, that obviously entails the removal of any structures that have guarantees for individuals that were enjoying protections that that central authority was providing.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah. I mean, the thing that I guess very briefly, the thing that I would say is I think that at least from my point of view, the reason why I'm more exercised about right wing authoritarianism is because it is a much more salient political force in American life today. And because, you know, you have these massacres at an El Paso Walmart, at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, at the grocery store in Buffalo, etc. And I'm not seeing, maybe they're out there and I don't know about them, but I'm not aware of Stalinist purges. I don't even know what it would be because they don't have, because there's no political, they have no political power. If that was an issue, then we could talk about it. I'm sure if Orwell was alive, he would want to talk about it. I don't mean to ventriloquise Eric Blair.

Mike Freedman

He was also very clear that on a war footing he was okay with certain types of censorship because it supported an effort to remove a greater evil. He wasn't an absolutist either. That's a reasonable point.

Jonathan M. Katz

The upshot of this whole thing at the end of 2023 on Substack is that the head of the platform made a very public statement. The Nazis are welcome, literal Nazis, he used the word, are welcome on the platform, and that he thinks that the best thing is to allow them to build up email lists and write publications and make money. There were many that I found. People have said they found 16. I found 16 that had swastikas and sonnenrads on them, there were many more than that, explicitly Nazi sites. And, you know, the ones that I was reviewing that traffic in extremism and anti-Semitism and hateful ideology, that is a much, much larger list.

And people have come to me and found even more since. What I would say is that number is only going to grow. And at some point, I hate to think this, but at some point my fear is that we're going to see something like Christchurch or Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh massacre or something like that happening, except instead of the manifesto or the author posting on 4chan or 8kun or whatever, that it's going to be on Substack.

And the reason why I left Substack, ultimately it was partially because of that and because I just didn't want to be associated with this thing anymore. And also because I felt that Hamish, the thing that he did that really pissed me off was sharing private conversations with Casey Newton, who is one of his most esteemed and celebrated, literally the the icon on the Substack, the sample page of the Substack app on the App Store and Google Play. He took an internal communication with Casey and gave it to Public, to Michael Shellenberger's and sometimes Matt Taibbi's publication because he thought that it would make Casey look bad, and that's not illegal behavior, maybe it's not even immoral, but I think it's very unethical and it just made me not trust them.

And I just didn't want anything to do with that anymore. And so all of these things, I mean, that's what I would say. That's what I would say. I mean, yes, we could talk about Stalinism. I have a lot of things to say about it. But the threat in America and in the West right now is from a very specific kind of authoritarianism that happens to be on the right, and that's what we're seeing a lot more of. It's not a surprise to me that I would have found a lot more. I didn't find any, but I'm sure there's some Stalinist newsletter. I have no idea. In fact, some of the Nazis use communist iconography because they do this third positionist thing.

Anyway, I've got to go. I'm sorry.

Mike Freedman

No, Jonathan, thank you. You've been incredibly generous with your time. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you. I hope it's been interesting and valuable for you also.

Jonathan M. Katz

Yeah, I know. It's just been a great conversation. I look forward to seeing what you do with this and hopefully people will react to it in the respectful and measured and intellectually exchanging tone that we have tried to display. I don't know, my hopes aren't amazingly high for that, but I hope we see that.

Mike Freedman

Well, what was it they said about Nuremberg trials? That it was the greatest tribute ever paid by passion to reason, something like that. So I think we have something to aspire to then.

Well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I'd like to thank Jonathan Katz for joining me and of course, all of you for listening.

Please check the show notes to find links to Jonathan's work. You can also check out our web site, 1984.today, for ways you can support the podcast. Of course, the biggest thing you can do is share it, talk about it, maybe leave a comment to give your own thoughts on what we've discussed. Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, keep the fire burning. We'll be back with more fuel next time.

Goodbye.